How a Health Coach Has Fun!

What do you get when you put 5000 health coaches in a room, some amazing speakers, cool prizes, major announcements and 10,000 dancing feet?  You get the most amazing weekend I just had at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition® Mega Conference in Long Beach, CA and a lot of noise!

I’m back in my favorite place to be, California.  I love being here.  Even when it’s cold (for here) it’s still amazing.  I get to be outside in the warm sunny fresh air and walk looking at the ocean.  Sometimes I even get lucky and see some hot actors filming Private Practice.  Just saying, Tim Daly and Benjamin Bratt are even better looking in person.  I wanted to run up and tell them not to eat all the junk food I just saw them rolling around on the food trolley but I didn’t want to get arrested.

The MEGA conference was presented for free for me as a graduate or student of the school.  Well I did pay to fly here and stay here but the two day conference was free.  There were many great speakers.  Mark Sission who wrote Primal Blueprint gave us the details on how to follow his program.  If it means looking like him I’m all in.  He’s in amazing shape.  This is a diet that we actually just started following at my house to see how we felt.  It’s already gluten free so it’s easy to slide into it.  You eat vegetables and protein, organic and clean, making sure you get in your fat but not too much. You eat fruit but not too much as the sugars in fruit can play with your balance.  No grains of any sort and no beans and stay away from that sugar.  I thought beans would be hard to give

Mark Sission and fellow student Emily Barker

up but having already given up gluten years ago it’s really not hard to make adjustments like this.  His directions on how much to eat, eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re not.  So far I’m really liking it but stay tuned for more.  If you’re following this diet I’d love to hear from you.

We also heard from Julia Ross who shared her wealth of knowledge and experience.  What stood out for me the most was this:  it’s been proven that sugar is 4 times as addictive as cocaine.  Yeah, 4 times.  It’s an addictive drug that you may have been working to kick the habit like me.  In case you’re questioning addictive behavior here are the markers:  loss of control, continued use despite adverse effects, withdrawl symptoms, relapse 97% and progressive and terminal.  Yep it’s got it all.   Here’s a list of addictive foods:  sugars, starches, chocolate, gluten and casein.  How much sugar is in the food you’re eating and can you give it up?

Then we heard from the most alive and entertaining person who is beyond passionate about what he does, David Wolfe.  If you have checked out my favorites page you’ll see an affiliate link to his raw chocolate, Sacred Chocolate.  It’s really good.  He shared so much information about foods and what each one does for our bodies that it was amazing.  I’ll be trying more beet juice to detox the liver and eating more berries to help with my eye site and looking into more of those amazing Asian mushrooms.

John Robbins shared his wonderful story about him and his father, the founder of Baskin Robbins.  John has written many books on healthy eating and living.  I was so mesmerized by what he was sharing that I didn’t take any notes.

One of my favorite speakers was Seane Corn.  She spoke about serving and supporting our clients as health coaches.   Working with others and ourselves not just with what is easy, but that the transformation within the shadow.  That area we may not look into very often.  Seane is an internationally celebrated yoga teacher known for her activism and inspirationally form of teaching.  She is the National Yoga Ambassador for YouthAids, co-creator of Off The Mat, Into the World programs and co-founder of “Bare Witness” Humanitarian Tours.

During the weekend IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, made some really cool announcements.

Recently, the Integrative Nutrition® curriculum was thoroughly evaluated by the National College Credit Recommendation Service. The end result? The National College Credit Recommendation Service has established a recommendation for 29 college credits for Integrative Nutrition’s Health Coach Training Program, and 11 college credits for the Immersion Program!

That’s 40 college credits for both programs! This means that an IIN education can now be an integral component of an undergraduate degree. Amazing!    Very exciting for me who graduated in February and is now in their Immersion Program (free to graduates).

They also announced that all of the program materials for school will be available through an app coming soon.  What a great way to access all of my materials.

Also on the web will be a Coach Directory site where anyone can come and interact with health coaches and find the right one for them.

Plus they announced some new really cool programs I can share with you.  I can’t wait until those are available.  I’ll be sharing those via my newsletter so make sure you are subscribed.

Oh, did I mention too they are giving away tuition too for graduates who go out and make a difference.  I hope to be on their short list.  Soon you may notice a few changes around here so I can provide you with more information.  I’m here to help more people who live a gluten-free life know what to eat, what to do in social situations, how to please their family’s food preferences and how to love food they put into their bodies and have the food love them back.

It was an amazing weekend and I’m so fortunate to have experienced it.  Oh and I’ve left off one of the best part.  I got to meet many of my classmates in person.  We sat together, ate together, danced together, learned together and had a blast together.  I hope to see them again, real soon.

If you want to read more about my school hop over to my Health Coach page or feel free to email me.

thank you to my fellow classmates for these great photos.  

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